Evaluation of Implementation Process of Tech-Volunteer Program in Palliative Care: ITV-Pal Program

The inclusion of volunteers to the Team in the care of the patient and the family is continually increasing. The requests for volunteers by the Medical Care Teams have been increasing year after year by 5%, reaching about 75 requests received in 2019. 85% of these requests are assigned a volunteer and the 15% who are not assigned is because the volunteer does not have the required profile which responds to the patient's needs. These statistics show, on the one hand, the important and irreplaceable work that volunteers offer in social support to the patient and this is perceived both by the patient and their family who decide to have it, and also by the Care Team that is aware of the benefits of "non-professional" care, which also humanises palliative care. On the other hand, the volunteer is increasingly present in our society and this is positive, so that more people offer their collaboration and this in turn "normalises" their role in palliative care.

Although volunteers contribute millions of hours of work, the review of bibliography found no sufficiently robust studies to merit inclusion, and even less when associating PC volunteering and NT. As more research is needed on the impact of training and support for palliative care volunteers, this study intends to study the state of art of technophilia and technophobia among patients, relatives, volunteers and healthcare professionals in PC, and according to the results, implement and evaluate a volunteer training programme in the use of new technology to support patients dying at home and their relatives.

The best approach to evaluate the implementation process of complex intervention is the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. Basic quantitative measures of implementation may be combined with in-depth qualitative data to provide detailed understandings of intervention functioning on a small scale. Use quantitative methods to measure key process variables and allow testing of pre-hypothesised mechanisms of impact and contextual moderators. Use qualitative methods to capture emerging changes in implementation, experiences of the intervention and unanticipated or complex causal pathways, and to generate new theory.

Quantitative approach:

• Pragmatic cluster randomized clinical trial to test the efficacy (the unit of randomization is the volunteer and the unit of analysis is the patient/relative).
• Before-after design for satisfaction of volunteers and HPC with the intervention and its implementation to test the effectiveness.
• Cost-utility study from the perspective of the funder with a time horizon of one year. A detailed cost analysis including costs for the adaptation of volunteer standard course to ITVPal Programme as well as the recruitment and training costs of the volunteers will be performed.